The Lost Gospel and Its Contents eBook

“In like manner as Jesus Christ
our Saviour, having been made flesh by the Word
of God, had both flesh and blood for our Salvation,
so likewise have we been taught that the food
which is blessed by the prayer of His Word, and
from which our blood and flesh are by transmutation
nourished is the Flesh and Blood of that Jesus Who
was made flesh.” (Apol. I. ch. lxvi.)

I trust the reader will acquit me, in making this
quotation, of any desire to enunciate any Eucharistic
theory of the presence of Christ’s Flesh in
the Eucharist. All I have to do with is the simple
fact that both Philo and St. John speak of the Word
as the Bread of Life; but Philo explains that bread
to be “reason,” and St. John makes our
Lord to set it forth as His Flesh, and Justin takes
no notice of the idea of Philo, and reproduces the
idea of the fourth Gospel.

And yet we are to be told that Justin “knew
nothing” of the Fourth Gospel, and that his
Logos doctrine was “identical” with that
of Philo.

SECTION XVIII.

DISCREPANCIES BETWEEN ST. JOHN AND THE SYNOPTICS.

The author of “Supernatural Religion”
devotes a large portion of his second volume to setting
forth the discrepancies, real or alleged, between
the Synoptics and the Fourth Gospel.

In many of these remarks he seems to me to betray
extraordinary ignorance of the mere contents of the
Fourth Gospel. I shall notice two or three remarkable
misconceptions; but, before doing this, I desire to
call the reader’s attention to the only inference
respecting the authorship of this Gospel which can
be drawn from these discrepancies.

St. John’s Gospel is undoubtedly the last Gospel
published; in fact, the last work of the sacred canon.
The more patent, then, the differences between St.
John and the Synoptics, the more difficult it is to
believe that a Gospel, containing subject-matter so
different from the works already accepted as giving
a true account of Christ, should have been accepted
by the whole Church at so comparatively recent a date,
unless that Church had every reason for believing
that it was the work of the last surviving Apostle.

Take, for instance, the [apparent] differences between
St. John and the Synoptics respecting the scene of
our Lord’s ministry, the character of His discourses,
the miracles ascribed to Him, and the day of His Crucifixion,
or rather of His partaking of the Paschal feast.
The most ignorant and unobservant would notice these
differences; and the more labour required to reconcile
the statements or representations of the last Gospel
with the three preceding ones, the more certain it
is that none would have ventured to put forth a document
containing such differences except an Apostle who,
being the last surviving one, might be said to inherit
the prestige and authority of the whole college.

It would far exceed the limits which I have prescribed
to myself to examine the Fourth Gospel with the view
of reconciling the discrepancies between it and the
Synoptics, and also of bringing out the numberless
undesigned coincidences between the earlier and the
later account, of which the writer of “Supernatural
Religion,” led away by his usual dogmatic prejudices,
has taken not the smallest notice.